Japan's putative "grabbing" of the Senkaku Islands has been shrilly reported in Chinese media this past month. Known in China as the Diaoyu Islands, this small collection of islets and rocky outcroppings in the East China Sea has lain outside of direct Chinese control since 1895. By 1970, the discovery of probable fossil fuel resources transformed these uninhabited islets into a watery stage for political theatre.

Dangerous brinksmanship these past two months has seen incursions by Chinese marine surveillance craft, an embarrassing water gun naval "battle" between Taiwanese and Japanese ships, fierce anti-Japanese protests and torched Japanese factories on the mainland. Yet last Wednesday, Japan made a small but potentially important conciliatory gesture. Official sources indicated that they might be willing to "acknowledge" China's claim for the first time, a calculated move to allow the Chinese to save face and defuse tensions. It remains to be seen whether the scandal-weakened Chinese side would accept this, faced as they are with a delicate leadership transition in November and a population whose fury has helped put pressure on Japan but may prove difficult to rechannel.

Chinese people's long-standing animus toward their erstwhile colonial overlord is, of course, very real. Yet Chinese rage against Japan, as performed, resembles a poorly sutured wound that the Chinese state can tear open and let bleed when expedient – though which the authorities sometimes hurry to stitch up again lest they risk losing control. Being in Beijing, Shanghai, and elsewhere in China this past September reminded me more than once of the Two Minutes Hate scene in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and even of Hate Week itself.

Winston, the novel's wretched protagonist, describes the Two Minutes Hate as a "hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness" where one "could not help sharing in the general delirium". Groups of co-workers unleash a brief torrent of ritual patriotic abuse each morning in dystopian London, snarling and screaming at the despicable figures of the enemy that flash on a big telescreen.

Comparisons between present-day China and the soulless, dreary totalitarian socialist state immortalised in Orwell's masterpiece are difficult to sustain after seeing clutch after clutch of Chinese teenagers, dressed in the latest quasi-Japanophile fashion, walk down a mobbed Beijing pedestrian shopping arcade nibbling at bouquets of candy floss and prattling on as if the phrase "commodity fetishism" had never crossed their young lips.

Yet the blistering anti-Japanese media campaign I witnessed upon my arrival in China bore a close resemblance to the organised "hate" that Orwell so memorably described. Chinese TV, for example, featured cartoonish portrayals of rightwing Japanese wannabe powerbrokers attempting to inflame the territorial dispute. Of course, it seemed to matter little that many such reactionaries in Japan are widely seen as out-of-touch and occasionally as buffoons. (Though wary of Chinese intimidation, Japan's population is, nearly seventy years after WWII, about as truly pacifist as I've encountered in the industrialised world.)

Other menacing video depicted imposing American naval carrier groups, suggesting that just out of view on China's coast lurked sinister forces bent on further predatory operations against islets there. Tellingly, the Chinese navy chose this juncture to unveil its first aircraft carrier, refurbished after purchase from the Ukraine. Chinese warplanes are apparently not yet capable of landing on the carrier, but the move played well with Chinese audiences and sent an aggressive message to China's rivals.

In rather comical solidarity, Chinese networks also started broadcasting weather reports for the Diaoyu Islands, as if any day now Chinese holidaymakers might lounge on a steep, rocky shoreline overlooking the area's shark-infested waters.

The tacitly state-sanctioned venting of spleen against Japan certainly came easily to a lot of Chinese, many raised since childhood to look askance at things Japanese. Thousands participated in protests, during which Chinese pelted the Japanese embassy in Beijing, and consulates elsewhere, with eggs, bottles, rocks, and other missiles. Angry mobs in a range of cities vandalised Japanese businesses there and called for boycotts of Japanese products. Such bigotry, while no doubt sincere, could lead to absurd outcomes. For example, a group of taxi drivers accused one of my friends (a European woman with light brown hair, blue eyes and fair skin) of being Japanese and refused her fare. The occasional puzzling rumour that "Japanese people" were in town – meaning us – circulated around during our time there. Perhaps xenophobia takes what it can get.

The Chinese authorities' historical tendency to unleash, then rein in, such demonstrations of anti-Japanese sentiment is, fittingly, prefigured in Orwell's prose as well: after all, such hate "could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp" – and could even be directed toward China's politburo itself. Though this summer's xenophobic venting may have proven useful, the chances are that, in the runup to the party's 18th national congress on 8 November – inaugurating a tense, once-a-decade leadership transition – the state will choose stability over frenzy.

Ironically, this coming period could have been a "Nixon to China" opportunity for Beijing. The deep scars of wartime memory notwithstanding, Chinese and Japanese economic partnership has proved highly compatible and profitable in recent years. Though extremely unlikely in practice, if the new Chinese leadership sought rapprochement, the two nations could, potentially, even deepen co-operation to reverse slowing growth in China's economy and revitalise Japan's anaemic one. I believe the will exists on the Japanese side, however weary they are of Chinese bullying. Perhaps the biggest obstacle remains the "blowlamp" of nationalist Chinese opinion itself. After years of stoking the furnace of Chinese public outrage – to diplomatic and political advantage – Chinese leaders might find it difficult to avoid the blowback.